ojme-02-2018-01-04

Journal: Open Journal of Mechanical Engineering (OJME)
Author: Joel Osburn*

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Doi:10.7508/jme.02.2018.01.04

The analysis of fluid flow in an elbow is important for a number of engineering applications like heat exchangers, particle transport piping system, air conditioning devices etc. Due to lack of available theory and model for pressure drop calculation in multiphase flow, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study has been performed for single and two phase flow in an elbow and presented in this paper. CFD analysis of single and two phase flow in a 12.7 mm elbow was performed using FLUENT. Analysis performed for three different air velocities between 15.24 45.72 m/sec and three different water velocities of 0.1 to 10.0 m/sec. Pressure drop profiles and cross-sectional pressure contour maps were presented for characteristic flow behaviors in both single and multi-phase flows. CFD results were compared with two different empirical models showing reasonable agreement.